I suspect there aren't many schools where you'd find a Professor Emeritus in the English Department saying something like “But the method is worth learning, like calculus.” But the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is such a school, and Dr. Charles P. Campbell is such a professor.

Obviously, no one could use this sort of full-blown analysis very often. It's not much fun to do, except in the way that solving calculus problems is fun. And it wouldn't exactly be a pleasure to receive such an analysis. But the method is worth learning, like calculus, because it's an active knowledge rather than a passive one.

Passive knowledge is at best semioperational. It requires memorizing rules ("Avoid the passive.") and learning to recognize when to apply them ("Is 'Ed was retired' a passive?"). An active knowledge is always operating in the background, activating itself when it's needed.

——Dr. Charles P. Campbell, “Using Transformational Grammar as an Editing Tool”

Of all the linguistics classes I took in college — with the possible exception of Sandy Chung and Armin Mester's Poetry and Language, which I'm pleased to see they're still teaching — I probably enjoyed Syntax I the most. (Transformational grammar is fun the way calculus is fun. — Yes, calculus is fun. Haven't you seen Stand and Deliver?) But even when I went straight from UCSC to a job editing technical publications for Fujitsu Learning Media (as you can see if you click on the link, they still need the help), it never occurred to me that transformational grammar could be used as an editing tool.

But, as they warned us at FLM, often “know-how are not exposed from project manager's brain.” The knowledge — the internal understanding of grammar that I developed on my own, and the way of thinking about syntax that I learned at UCSC — was still there, “operating in the background,” as Dr. Campbell says.

Which is a damned good thing, because I'd never get any writing done if I had to stop and glue my infinitives back together all the time.